Hamish is from Melbourne, Australia, and given that this was his first time in DC, I offered to give him my “world that learned to love better” tour, in the immediate area of DC9.

What I love about Washington, DC, is that a tour like this doesn’t need to take you very far. The Howard Theatre (@HowardTheatre) is a few blocks away, featuring a beautiful statue of Duke Ellington who performed there, along with Ella Fitzgerald and Cab Calloway. Same goes for the Lincoln Theatre, a few blocks the other way. The Vermont Baptist Church and Thurgood Marshall Center, where Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thurgood Marshall both spent time changing the world, round out the epicenter of culture, struggle, innovation, freedom (see: Photo Friday: Washington, DC USA, 1968 and 2014 for images of what happened on this street corner in 1968).

I walk by these monuments almost every day and the only thing they are missing are more people to discover them.

The tour is sort of a repayment for one that Kristin herself took me on when we snuck over to the Motown Museum in 2012 (see: Photo Friday: Story of incredible innovation – at Hitsville, USA). It’s what innovators do to and for each other, share their passion for the future as seen through the eyes of the people who lived it before us.